suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Brad ISNARD & Saoli CHU: ASSISTED DENSITY envisions a future form of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) whose priority is not the construction of hard housing systems. NYCHA becomes a latent structure which connects the various circulatory systems of the Bronx and creates new territories that permit the proliferation of social programs to alleviate the historically high population, low flexibility, mono-programmed tower blocks of NYCHA.

NYCHA’s new priority is the division, expansion, or relinquishment of territory informed by sensory inputs that monitor the movements and desires of its inhabitants. CCTV systems and biometric identification systems collect data to inform the formal and legal structuring of the system.

Conflicts between individuals and the collective method of analysis embed the system with moments of failure, which allows the structure to acrobatically assume new forms and social arrangements over time.